Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday September 01, 2009 @02:43PM
from the cross-platform dept.

imamac writes "Startup Weekend was a 54-hour coding marathon held on Microsoft's campus last weekend. It was designed to encourage the use of MS programming technologies. However, the winner of the contest was an iPhone app: '"Awkward," whispered Startup Weekend organizer Clint Nelsen into the microphone upon announcing the top vote getter.'"

This could be the end of that little experiment. Rule 1 is don't say anything good about your competitor. I wonder how much air time this will get in the media. And I can see the Apple vs. Microsoft ads now. Sucks to be a 'softie right about now.

"Not to get too far offtopic, but your sig is highly interesting. Has it occurred to you that Bill and Steve did exactly that?"
IIRC, Apple came first. And much about Microsoft is due to its aping Apple.

That Apple still survives is an artifact of anti-competitive laws. In this case, those laws have worked famously.

Without Apple, chances are Microsoft would still be a Cygnus-like little shop writing interpreters and compilers for hardware manufacturers.

Microsoft had two big breaks that made them what they are: the Z80 card for the Apple II and the contract to provide PC-DOS. And arguably, without the reputation MS built in the CP/M world with the SoftCard, they might not have gotten the IBM deal.

I was there. The last two in Seattle were at Adobe and Google. Many thanks for MS for sponsoring this.
Other than to win the prize, I think everyone would agree it would be stupid to target Windows mobile phone users. The fan favorites actually did both a Palm Pre and iPhone version of their app.
Both the MS sponsored prize (preannounced for best team on MS platform) and the incubator (most promising business model) sponsored prizes went to the SearchKick team on the MS platform.
I think 13 or so of the

Actually the Top Award was given to another startup, Search Kick. they got the MS prize but also the prize of the design incubator.
the other prize, public vote, was given to learnthatname.
all great projects !

Yes, and if you read the second comment - posted by the article's author - you'd see that the iPhone app received the most votes by far. It was not eligible for the prize money, though, since that specifically predicated it was for an app "built on Microsoft technologies".

So if you ported mono to the iPhone and then write wrote an application using it, would that count? Since.net is a Microsoft technology, mono provides a.net framework, and the application is "built on" a Microsoft technology? Just wondering..

You can't execute scripted content on the iPhone outside of the tools given, so no full mono stack... though you can do an ahead of time build against mono, which a few people are doing... building or even testing such a beast out of Visual Studio is another issue.

Insightful my fat arse. No, you cannot remove your appendix using a toothpick sticked into your left eye because your hand won't fit through the eye socket. But you can very well develop directly on a PDA which can be quite comfortable with a full keyboard and a large screen some of them have.

FWIW, I developed for Windows Mobile / Smartphone for several years. The tools were all free. Back then they had something called Visual Studio Embedded (free of course). The best thing was I was able to write a single version of the application (a non-trivial multi-threaded, multimedia application with network connectivity) which ran on my Windows desktop as well as on Windows Mobile (aka Pocket PC) and Windows Smartphone. I did the vast majority of my debugging and testing on the desktop. Very rarely did I have to do any mobile-specific debugging, other than wrestling with the &*%^$# cell network (this was from 2001 through 2005, when pushing data through the cell network was barely functional).

Oh, and by the way, deploying to phones is free also. I don't need Microsoft's permission, nor do I have to pay them a fee.

That's an odd claim to try to make, considering they're so closely related. Have you actually used both enough to gain some level of mastery? Because I have, and the difference is, in my opinion, more a matter of preference than between any other two languages I can think of. One thing I will say, though, is I find Objective-C syntax absolutely horrendous to read compared to C++.

So you can build all the applications you want. But if you want to actually run them on your iPhone, it's $100.

"We're giving away this car for free! But if you actually want to start it and drive it, you'll need to pay $50,000 for the key. Oh, and if you somehow tinker with the car so that you don't need to use this key, the car's warranty is voided."

Nice dance, fanboi. But if you want to develop applications for your own personal use on the iPhone, it'll cost you $100.

Nice research skills there MS fan boi, your own personal one is free others cost money! You can develop for the Windows Mobile platform for free, but not with any MS supported compilers. Minimum price for the ability to do it with supported compilers is whatever Visual Studio standard costs. Like $300.00 but you can get it free if you give up a weekday and attend the exact right launch party like I did.

Minimum price for the ability to do it with supported compilers is whatever Visual Studio standard costs. Like $300.00 but you can get it free if you give up a weekday and attend the exact right launch party like I did.

There is a little known (I guess not anymore, now that I post it on/.) marketing twist that is presently in force with regard to Visual Studio: you can "upgrade" [microsoft.com] to VS Standard or Professional from any of the Express editions (which are of course downloadable for free), or from any "competing product" - e.g. Eclipse or NetBeans counts. This effectively means that you get to buy full license for upgrade price. For Standard, this is $200 - still not cheap, but I thought it's worth clarifying the number as it stands today.

Also, if you're going to write and sell applications - i.e. you're going to run a startup - you could apply for BizSpark [microsoft.com] (technically this is on a case-by-case basis, but I haven't heard of anyone turned away) and get VS and most other Microsoft developer offerings kinda free - the only caveat that you'll have to pay $100 when quitting the program, either in 3 years, or when you make $1M in profit - whichever one happens sooner.

No you can't. Installing and debugging app on the device requires Apple signed certificate (provisioning profile) and that costs $99. But then again, any sane developer can recover this cost in a few days of sales.

If you want to install your app on an actual phone it has to be signed using a $99 development key.

I really don't think it's that big of a deal, but folks will get bent out of shape about anything. Hell, if I really cared, I could pay one windows box worth of dollars, then buy visual studio, then buy a Windows Mobile phone, and avoid paying $99 dollars to run my custom application on my phone.

Does anyone know if Microsoft has any plans for Windows Mobile? It's old and slow, but I actually prefer the UI to the iPhone's. If they made a decent web browser they could be back in the game! I prefer the precision of the style to the fatfingered approach of the iPhone and Pre.

Microsoft will (hopefully) be releasing Windows Mobile 7 at the end of the year. Their currently supported version is v6.1, though many people have happily upgraded to their (very) reliable v6.5 betas (myself included). WM7 will focus on an OS-wide finger-friendly UI (which WM6.5 sort of has, but not quite entirely) and improved usability.

Honestly though, its competitors are really starting to sap up all of their competitive advantages, which is starting to spell the beginning of the end for its relevance.

(as Opera Desktop 10 shipped, their site getting a bit hammered now, check later if you wish)

It is a real browser, just like iPhone Safari. As a bonus, it will have ''turbo'' (mobile compressing/reformatting proxy) too. Skyfire on the other hand, is a shell for a Desktop mozilla, which does amazing things like playing flash videos no matter whatever format they are. I also loved its appr

Are you kidding me? How many Apple computers are running MS Office. Personally I think if Microsoft put more focus on cross-platform applications they would be able to leverage their extensive experience in developing software. The have gotten so bogged down in pi##ing contests with Google, Oracle, IBM and almost every other windmill out there that they have lost sight of what made Microsoft all their money, Basic and MS Office.

I say now that RIM has released an SDK for VS we should create serious appl

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Um yeah, but you're right Apple didn't invent those but it does follow them quite well. In the early days of external modems, most of the people that put the power supply inside the modem instead of in a dongle had plastic melting and cracking problems. I guess it just sort of carried along. Heat has been the enemy of electronics for quite a long time.

Well, let's be fair -- the iPod does, indeed, use USB Mass Storage. It also exposes its library through a ton of files in a bizarre proprietary format, so it's not like you can actually transfer music that way, but it's certainly a step above this.

With the older iPods you could, including the first shuffle (around 2006). Then later the data folder was hidden, and later after that the filenames were scrambled (even though the content was the same and your favorite music software could read ID3 tags it made no difference).

The explanation given to these actions were that the record companies didn't want copying music from iPods to computers easy. This is why iTunes doesn't allow importing from iPods that aren't already linked to the existing library o

Do you know how many devices that are out there that use the ipod connector? Billions. You can't just change that. They should have made the right decision in the first place, but it wasn't so obvious in those days, everyone was making there own connector.

And maybe a mini-usb or micro-usb doesn't provide enough support to actually hold the device upright.

The other platforms also don't seem to be selling as well despite having "Better Features". According to my friends that don't have the iPhone they also don't work that smoothly when they do do those things.

(while not always as nice looking, other platforms don't have these limitations)

If I wanted viruses on my phone I would have gotten Windows Mobile. (Yeah WinMO doesn't really have a virus problem but I don't want the possibility on my iPhone because its popular enough to be targeted)

Why do people keep repeating that? Even Microsoft's own developers admit that their C/C++ indexing is primitive and broken, while Eclipse's CDT, which has had maybe 0.0001% of the funding and man-hours, is already far superior.

Yeah, sorry. I use Visual Studio every day and dabble in Eclipse and XCode. I prefer either of the later to Visual Studio. Visual Studio isn't a bad IDE, and it is certainly an appropriate choice for Windows only development, but saying it "light years ahead" of any other environment suggests you have never used anything else.